Globally we are living through quite turbulent times with tensions between the west and some large superpowers in the east threatening to spill over. This kind of situation doesn’t necessarily always result in out and out war, in fact it is increasingly taking place behind a computer screen, tens of thousands of miles away. You will have no doubt seen on the news how regularly government sites and the websites of some of the UK’s largest companies are being hacked or taken down with customers data stolen in the process. If this can happen successfully to some of the largest companies, then it can happen to any SME as well. For this reason, it is important to do a vulnerability assessment of your business to find out if you are particularly exposed or open to attach and if they is anything more that you could be doing to keep both yourself and your customers’ data safe.
Focus On Your Website
Your website is the portal to your business, it is where customers find out about you, it is where customers pay and enter their details and then often where their personal data is stored. It is therefore going to be one of the key places where cyber security is even more important. One of the most widely used CMS’s (Content Management System) is WordPress and businesses frequently collect data on their customer via WordPress using things like Contact Form 7. They may also potentially check out and make purchases via WooCommerce meaning if someone could get in to your site then they could cause a lot of damage. One of the most frequent types of attack on WordPress sites is a brute-force attack, this is essentially where hackers try thousands of different combinations of passwords to try and get the right one. Things can be put in place to make this tougher by changing the login URL from the typical /wp-admin/ to a different one (this is one of the many reasons WordPress is targeted, the login URL tends to always be the same). Another way is to limit the number of login attempts a user can make before being locked out or only allowing certain IP addresses to login.
Be Careful When Handling & Storing Data
Business cyber security is essential when it comes to storing data, a data breach and theft of people’s personal information can lead companies to be sued for millions if they can’t prove they had reasonable precautions and protections in place. Getting a cyber security company in to do a full assessment of your current setup and what should be implemented to improve security can protect you in the event that something should happen. In the event that an incident should happen you can call a company in to stop it in it’s tracks and put things in place to make sure it is unlikely to happen again. Alongside the above advice it is also important to look at cyber insurance in case the worst should happen to ensure that if civil action is taken against your company you are covered by your insurance policy.